Seventh-Grade Students Share Goals During ‘World Of Goals’ Unit

March 9, 2014

Seventh-grade students in Mrs. Imfeld's family and consumer science classes recently completed a unit on managing their lives. Many aspects involved in this topic include making good decisions, managing their daily lives by their awareness of resources available to them, and then setting some goals for themselves involving the use of their own personal values, goals, priorities and standards.

Students were introduced to the "world of goals" and challenged to share goals pertaining to their individual lives. They shared the importance of targeting goals for themselves and how to reach them. They discussed the difference of setting long-term goals and short-term goals in reaching a specific target.

Each student wrote a long goal on an "arrow" and below this, wrote all of the short-term goals they would need to reach in trying to complete their long-term goal. This long-term goal needed to be met during the 10-week marking period that Mrs. Imfeld had them in class. They shared these goals with friends and family.

Daily, students shared with the class how they were reaching their short-term goals and working towards their main, long-term goal. They enjoyed targeting their "goal arrows" towards the "Goals Eye." A big part of these goal settings and being attainable was the idea of being realistic and not procrastinating.

Some great examples of these realistic goals for a typical seventh grader were: improving grades in a specific subject, making honor or merit roll, working towards records in their specific sport, being on time for events, working as a better team player in their certain sport to win a game, or just playing better, getting along better with siblings, being a good friend, and practicing their instruments more.

All in all, the students came away with a better knowledge of how to set a goal and reach it. They realized the importance of being realistic, and how to reevaluate their short-term goals along the way to reaching their main long-term goal. Hopefully, as the students were actively involved in collecting/using/assessing their own goal-setting skills and providing input, they will now be able to apply this lesson to the real world of life management.